What does it mean to own your online identity?

Does it mean that you're free to take your data from a walled garden and move it elsewhere, a la Data Portability?

Or does it mean that you have complete control over it and you're free to mold it into whatever form you need it to take, delete it, share it, and otherwise do whatever you like with it?

Tony Hail wrote an interesting post discussing some of the more philosophical points of identity ownership in the digital age, and it sparked memories of some of the posts I wrote a while back about online identity ownership.  My thoughts haven't changed much in the years since I originally wrote about this, but it seems that more people are starting to think along these lines, and it's certainly a topic that's important enough to warrant further, extended, conversation.

My online identity is made of up the data I put on the Web.  My data IS my online identity.  Every blog post, tweet, and comment I put out into the Web becomes part of my online identity.  Right now, I only REALLY own the data in my blog.  This blog, right here, jasonkolb.com, is the only part of my online identity that I actually own.  *I* own the domain, *I* set the terms of service, *I* set the license for other people to use the content, and *I* decide what I want to let out into the wild.  Other than this blog, my identity is owned by LinkedIn, Twitter, and every other service that I put my data into.

Identity ownership is about owning versus renting.  Data Portability is about being able to move your furniture from one place to another when you move, identity ownership is about being able to tear down walls, put in an inground pool, and throw wild parties if you feel like it.  Both are important, but they're not the same thing.

Online identity ownership is all about DATA ownership.  Beyond the philosophical implications, this is actually a legal conversation.  This becomes obvious when people are forced to hand over their LinkedIn contacts by courts, and FaceBook and MySpace continually make strides towards locking users into their own walled gardens.  If you don't own the place where you're putting the data, you don't own the data, period.  You might get really pissed at your social networks for locking you in, but you are completely at their mercy in this regard, and unless the free market forces them to comply there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

The only real solution to this is to allow users to own the storage container for their data.  This is kind of an obscure concept, but it's an important one.  While the public at large might not be clamoring for this--yet--the early adopter crowd surely is, hence the visibility of the Data Portability movement.  But there are already solutions available today that will actually, really, for real, let you OWN your data, and that chunk of your online identity.  I truly feel that they're the wave of the future.

Amazon S3 is the 900 lb. gorilla in the TRUE data ownership area.  There are other pretenders to the throne, but S3 is the first and in my opinion the best service.  It doesn't focus on a pretty front-end or anything even remotely relating to usability, but that's OK.  It's personal storage--a utility, like electricity.  You pay for what you use.  And you do truly OWN the data.  It provides a glimpse of the future in the area of identity ownership.

JungleDisk, for example, lets you hook up S3 as a virtual drive on your machine.  You pay 15 cents a month per gig (to Amazon), but you own the data, nobody else can touch it.  SmugMug is like Flickr but better, because it also hosts your pictures on your own S3 account.  The only thing you're missing is the Flickr community, but that's the choice you're making when you use it--owning versus renting.  The first social network to allow users to store their data in their S3 account in a standarized format is going to score a major coup with the early adopter crowd.

There's no doubt in my mind that this is going to become a VERY hot issue over time, especially as the line between work and personal lives online continues to blur.  Unfortunately, when nobody explicitly owns the data except for a third party, it leaves the data in legal limbo and true ownership is left up to the courts.  This is uncharted water.  But the epiphany around this is on the way, and it's going to affect the startup arena in a big way when it does.